My Profile

My name is Steven Foster, a Microsoft CRM MVP, working at Intergen as the CRM Product and Marketing Manager. I have over 17 years of CRM experience delivering a multitude of CRM solutions across a number of countries. I hope you find my blog interesting!
I am also an entrepreneur reselling the HappyOrNot customer satisfaction service.

Problem: People can forward my email to anyone and as such the links are related to the person who forwarded it and not the person who received the email. So how can I capture the forward?

Unfortunately there is no easy way of doing this automatically, but what you can do and other customers do is add a button on your email, which states click here to forward this email. What this link can do is take a user to simple form that has a forward email box and a submit button. On entering the email and submitting the form we can then send an email to that new person with all the links correctly configured.

So what do I need to do to get this working, keeping it simple to start with

First of all do you need to create an email template for the email that a customer may forward

You then need to create a web content form, and add a single field “Email” to it

On the actions tab, select send email and select the email template created in step 1

Click on the embed button, and copy the link to the web form and paste it somewhere you can access later

Save and publish the new form

Navigate to the email template that you created in step 1 and edit

You now what to add to your template a link or button (image) on to your email instructing the user to click here to forward the email. So the link you what to embed to the image is the link you copied in step 4. It is key that you do not use the insert web content feature and select the web content form as this will embed it with data on the person you sent the email to and thus prepopulating the email when the user clicks the button. So by using the link you copied no additional attributes will be copied to it, meaning it will be blank when a user lands on the form.

Once updated the email template, you can save it

You are now ready to send out your communication using the email template. Anyone who clicks the link to forward will have a new email generated out of CRM / ClickDimensions and you will be able to track the additional conversions and clicks.

With the model above it does mean that you need to clone the forward form for each email that you send out with the forward button on it as it is specific to a email template.

Another way that you could make it more generic is passing in a hidden variable to the form and using a workflow to evaluate this variable and send the correct email to the new person

To do this way, you will need a little bit of JavaScript knowledge as follows:

Create a hidden field named Forward Email (you could use campaign code or anything that will identify the email to send)

Every marketing department wants some form of subscription management as a blanket un-subscribe is not ideal. Using ClickDimensions you have access to subscription lists. Subscription lists enable you to create areas of interest for your customers to subscribe to. Subscription lists can be added to one or more subscription pages using the standard web content record type. Once you have a subscription list you can then add it to an email you send out. All sounds good so far.

The problem though is how do you maintain a nice clean list of contacts or leads who have subscribed to stuff? If you use ClickDimensions you probably know what I am talking about if not see here for the details http://help.clickdimensions.com/managing-subscription-list-opt-ins/ (no point me going into it here as well, as fully articulated in this great article by ClickDimensions). The basic point is that you either have dirty lists or need to add fields to the contact or lead form.

But wait there is a better way of doing it now with the latest release of ClickDimensions that keeps your lists clean and does not require any new fields to represent new subscriptions.

How you ask? Use the workflow custom step provided by ClickDimensions to add and remove users from a static marketing list.

So how does this work, you ask?

The concept first

Subscription Lists are used to manage the interests that you want a user to sign up to

Static Marketing Lists are used to represent your internal representation of the subscription list

An internal marketing list might relate to one or more external subscription list as internally mean same thing but externally you might want to break things out

The value of Static marketing lists is that they can be used in advanced finds to identify individuals that exist in the list or not, you can combine lists into a dynamic marketing list, you can easily view on a Contact or Lead record the lists that a person is in just like having a field on the list, you can manually add people to the static list

Create a workflow to add or remove people from the static marketing list based on whether they subscribe in or out via the subscription page

Create a new workflow from Settings->Processes

Select the Subscription Preferences entity

Run on create of record and tick the delete workflow after execution to save space

In the designer you will now have to add a condition per subscription list, and sub condition to see if the person opted in or out. The action step will use the new ClickDimensions workflow custom step that can add or remove contacts and leads from lists.

The workflow should look something like this where I have 2 subscriptions lists one for Newsletters and the other for Events

The first condition checks the subscription preference subscription list record

The second sub condition checks the value of the Subscription Preference Preference attribute. In resembles ticking the box, out resembles leaving it blank or unpicking the box.

The parameters to be used in the new custom step are:

You can add this to the workflow via the Add Step button and selecting Marketing Lists -> Update Marketing List Members

Repeat the conditions for each subscription list and then Activate and you are now done.

Once you have activated you are up and running, your lists will stay clean, it will be easy for users to view what subscriptions a customer is subscribed up to and managed on going. Screenshot below is of the Contact associated marketing lists.

So you have created a static marketing list, added some members, but the count is greater than 5000 so in the associated members view you see 1 of 5000. How do I get a count of the members?

Its really easy and its been easy since V4 of CRM. On the marketing list entity there is a field called “Member Count”, add this to your form or view and it will display the actual count on the members in the list.

This only works for Static lists and by default only counts up to 50000 records. This can be increased in an On Premise solution adjusting the registry values.